Grandma’s life lessons serve Texans’ Mitchell well

“Before I leave this earth, I’m going to make sure you know how to survive,” his grandma told him.

They called Earl Mitchell out of school when she went to the hospital.

As a 14-year-old child who had known his grandmother only as the strong woman who raised 15 children, he hadn’t noticed her thinning frame. He couldn’t imagine life without her. She was the only person he went to for advice and the only person he felt really understood him.

Narnie Mitchell died of heart failure in the same month as her 77th birthday, with Earl sitting beside her and other family members in the room, praying.

They buried her at Paradise Funeral Home, and many people came to pay their respects. The teen stood under a tree several yards away instead of standing with them. He couldn’t bear to watch her body descend into the earth.

“As soon as it happened, I was lost, you know?” Mitchell said.

He started crying and apologized. His grandmother hated when he cried.

“Wasn’t quite sure where I was going to go,” Mitchell said. “For the first time in my life, I realized I had no plans. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.”

But because of her, he knew more than he thought he did. He knew the value of working hard. He knew how to care for his family. And he knew leaving behind the often impoverished lifestyle in which he grew up, the drug-infested Houston neighborhood of his childhood, would not be easy.

Mitchell looked for a way to do it anyway, because of her.

He learned to play football and went to college out of state. In 2010, fate decided it was time for him to go home. Only this time, as a third-round draft pick, the Texans’ backup nose tackle went back to a different Houston, miles away from the Houston of his youth.

Realities of lifeWhen grandma wakes up, she wants the kids to get out of the house and go play in the yard. His sister Sekeyla wants to play school. She is the teacher and Earl is a student. She passes out handouts and bosses him around to do his homework. Together they dream about a different life. They don’t just dream, they plan.

Earl always had trouble sleeping when he, his mother and his sister lived at the Salvation Army. He was 5.

At night, he would look out the window and see the old Continental Airlines headquarters in downtown Houston, a white skyscraper with a triangular top that had lights shining upward so they created a conical shape. The lights looked like the hair atop troll dolls. Troll dolls freaked him out. Earl thought that building must have been troll headquarters, so he stayed awake staring at it.

Other than that, “It was fun for me,” Earl said. “I loved it.”

A little girl lived there with her mother and the adults jokingly called her his girlfriend. He played with his Ninja Turtle toys and got to mix together all different kinds of sugary cereals into one bowl to eat.

They lived there for about six months.

Mitchell and his sister were born in Houston and moved around quite a bit with their mother. They also lived in various apartments together and sometimes lived with Earl’s grandmother.

At his grandmother’s house, Mitchell slept in the same room as two female cousins. At night, his grandmother turned the deadbolts before retiring to her room at the front of the three-bedroom home in Trinity Garden.

Their grandmother would give them passes or money to take the bus to school, but when she couldn’t Earl walked the three miles there, over a bridge on Tidwell Road past Forest Brook High School, a school most of his family attended but one Earl simply didn’t equate with success.

“Walking around here, you really don’t think you’re going to make it,” Mitchell said. But he hoped he did.

He knew not to get involved with people he saw hanging around on the street, people involved with drugs. They knew not to bother with him, either — that his grandmother would never stand for it. Examples of the destruction drugs caused were plenty, and steered Earl away from it.

His grandmother kept a sewing machine on the porch in front of the house, and he often sat cross-legged facing her as she worked at it. Sometimes she sent him to Wonder’s, a store down the street, past a funeral home and around a corner. The store is still crammed with packaged goods, candy, vegetables, a meat counter in the back and the Ramen noodles Earl used to eat nearly every day.

He went back last month and the woman at the cash register remembered after just a little bit of prompting.

“Remember me? Earl?” he asked, holding his hand horizontally to indicate how tall he was when she saw him regularly.

“Lisa’s son,” the woman said. Then she boasted of remembering him from when he was 4 or 5.

“What do you do?” she asked. Earl said he plays football. She mused about the good money he’ll make doing that.

One of his most vivid memories of going to Wonder’s is with family members in fifth grade. When he came out of the bathroom, he saw robbers pistol whipping the store’s employees. He saw an Asian man, who still works there, getting beaten repeatedly.

“It was just a bloody massacre,” Mitchell said.

After that robbery, something changed in their demeanor. The store was a little less friendly, understandably so.

A dad in name only

A black Cadillac pulls into the driveway, and young Earl sees it. He has seen it before and he thinks it might be his father, or perhaps a half-brother. The people inside give his grandmother money and then drive away. He runs out to see who it is, but whoever is inside the car rolls up the window and drives away before he gets there. They don’t want to see him. This keeps happening. He never figures out exactly what happens.

Mitchell saw his biological father only twice.

The first time, he was in eighth grade, just after his grandmother died.

The neighborhood doctor was his and his sister’s father, but he wasn’t a part of their lives. Mitchell had an abscess on his finger, so his aunt took him to see the doctor for whom he was named. The doctor put Neosporin on Earl’s finger. He asked how his mother and grandmother were. Earl told him his grandmother passed. The doctor replied that she was a good woman.

The second time was during Mitchell’s senior year of college after he saw a newspaper notice for Earl J. Lombard’s funeral. It was at the funeral home two blocks away from his grandmother’s house.

“I went there with my sister and my mom, kind of hoping to see somebody, maybe some half-brothers and sisters,” Mitchell said. “Maybe we got there early, I’m not sure.”

His receptionist was the only person who had signed the guest book.

Being biologically related to a doctor gave Mitchell hope. It made him feel that genetically he had the capability for success, perhaps to become a doctor as well.

“My grandma used to always say, ‘Do you want to be somebody or do you want to be a zero?’ ” Sekeyla said. “We wanted to be different.”

From North Shore to ArizonaIn the cartoon, Bugs Bunny digs a tunnel all the way across the Earth. Earl wants to try that, so he takes a shovel and starts digging in a field across the street from grandma’s house. He lasts three days digging until he concludes he’ll never get to China this way. He will find a way out, though.

It didn’t have to be football. Mitchell didn’t grow up thinking sports were the only way he could better his life.

He just wanted to do something very well. He tried that with the tuba he played in eighth grade. He woke up the whole neighborhood practicing “Lady Marmalade” in his grandma’s backyard. He lugged it around in case the bulky tuba helped him succeed.

Mitchell and Sekeyla shared ambition.

“We had the same mindset of … we’re going to live different,” he said. “We’re not going to live in a drug-infested neighborhood. We’re going to grow up and have families. If we want change, we have to be the change.”

She is four years older than he and is now a pharmacy technician. After their grandmother died, Sekeyla moved in with her mother instead of staying with the aunt and cousins who remained at their grandmother’s house. Mitchell didn’t want to go right away. His grandmother taught him to be the man of the house, doing chores to help with the upkeep.

Eventually, Sekeyla talked him into leaving. He moved in with their mother in her home in Galena Park in a school district that included North Shore High School.

There he met assistant coach Aaron Covington, who saw a boy who needed his help. Mitchell knew so little about football that when Covington asked if he wanted to be a linebacker or tight end, he chose tight end because he’d already forgotten the word “linebacker” by the time Covington said “tight end.”

“Here’s the thing with Earl,” Covington said. “He worked harder than any kid I’ve ever coached. He would do whatever you asked him to do. He did it to the best of his ability. Not only on the field, he did it in the classroom, too.”

He took it seriously when another coach told him he had to go to practice no matter what — unless there was a snowstorm. So Earl rode his bicycle to practice once in the middle of a hurricane.

Covington gave Mitchell another place to spend time. When the teen was diagnosed with a pea-sized brain tumor that did not need surgery, Covington took him to the doctor’s appointments and helped him secure health insurance through the school district. One summer, Earl spent nearly every day at his home.

“I usually dropped him off at home late in the evenings,” Covington said. “In the mornings, he would work out at school, in the summer strength and conditioning programs. I paid him a little bit of money for doing summer jobs. He became part of the family.”

Mitchell saw something there he’d never seen before. He saw a marriage and the life a husband and wife had together.

“I just wasn’t quite used to it,” he said. “It became something that I wanted one day because I thought they were doing it the right way.”

When the time came for college, Mitchell decided he would take whatever offer was farthest from Houston. When his farthest offer came from Utah, he decided he’d take his second farthest instead.

His college years at the University of Arizona were some of the best of his life.

Graffiti rings trueEarl stands before the gray gravestone marking the passage of Narnie Mitchell’s life. He feels her presence. He has just been drafted by the Texans, and he wants to thank her. She is why this happened. Before she left, she taught him how to survive.

Mitchell drives to Reliant Stadium from his grandmother’s house. Between the two locations, there is an overpass on Interstate 45 with uplifting graffiti that commands: “Be someone.” In less prominent lettering, but right in front of the louder letters, the artist wrote the word “Earl.” He doesn’t know the artist, but it reads as if it speaks directly to Mitchell.

Earl, be someone.

His workplace is symmetrical and tree-lined, with purple flowers blooming. Clean white lines and massive windows make the stadium gleam beneath the retractable roof.

“It’s so funny just seeing this side compared to where I grew up,” he said.

Mitchell, who turns 25 next week, lives just down the street from the stadium in a sleek and modern condominium. He isn’t quite ready to buy a home yet, though he could afford it. Two years ago he signed a rookie deal worth $2.67 million.

His grandmother’s home is still in the family, but Mitchell doesn’t go back there often. There last week, a woman called him over to her house next door. Her grandchildren wanted to meet the Texans player who was visiting.

One wanted to know if he could get them tickets. Another wanted Earl to train him. Then they argued about who could tackle.

Without his jersey, soft-spoken and gentle, Mitchell doesn’t look like a professional football player. But he is a Texan, and he knows he can influence these kids from his old neighborhood, better than drug pushers or gang members. He wants them to know they can have more than what they see every day.

They can survive, like his grandmother taught him. And then they can go beyond that and succeed.